that life of the stage, that fairy world of music and
song, dawned upon her! It was the only world that seemed to correspond
with her strange childish thoughts. It appeared to her as if, cast
hitherto on a foreign shore, she was brought at last to see the forms
and hear the language of her native land. Beautiful and true enthusiasm,
rich with the promise of genius! Boy or man, thou wilt never be a poet,
if thou hast not felt the ideal, the romance, the Calypso's isle that
opened to thee when for the first time the magic curtain was drawn
aside, and let in the world of poetry on the world of prose!

And now the initiation was begun. She was to read, to study, to depict
by a gesture, a look, the passions she was to delineate on the boards;
lessons dangerous, in truth, to some, but not to the pure enthusiasm
that comes from art; for the mind that rightly conceives art is but
a mirror which gives back what is cast on its surface faithfully
only--while unsullied. She seized on nature and truth intuitively. Her
recitations became full of unconscious power; her voice moved the heart
to tears, or warmed it into generous rage. But this arose from that
sympathy which genius ever has, even in its earliest innocence, with
whatever feels, or aspires, or suffers.

It was no premature woman comprehending the love or the jealousy that
the words expressed; her art was one of those strange secrets which
the psychologists may unriddle to us if they please, and tell us why
children of the simplest minds and the purest hearts are often so acute
to distinguish, in the tales you tell them, or the songs you sing, the
difference between the true art and the false, passion and jargon, Homer
and Racine,--echoing back, from hearts that have not yet felt what they
repeat, the melodious accents of the natural pathos. Apart from
her studies, Viola was a simple, affectionate, but somewhat wayward
child,--wayward, not in temper, for that was sweet and docile; but in
her moods, which, as I before hinted, changed from sad to gay and gay to
sad without an apparent cause. If cause there were, it must be traced to
the early and mysterious influences I have referred to, when seeking to
explain the effect produced on her imagination by those restless streams
of sound that constantly played around it; for it is noticeable that to
those who are much alive to the effects of music, airs and tunes often
come back, in the commonest pursuits of life, to vex, as it